Libmonster ID: UZ-1437

A brief overview and an attempt at analysis

Conference goals and outlines

WHAT was everyday, living, and real religiosity like in the Soviet Union, a state that was officially and fundamentally atheist and launched one of the most radical attacks on religion? what was the religiosity behind the facade of state atheism? And even more so-behind the" second facade "of official religious institutions, grudgingly tolerated by the authorities, which were considered as "remnants", doomed to gradual withering away? how do we get through the thick of official atheist discourse to authentic sources that record evidence or even individual, hard-to-identify fragments of evidence about how people prayed (individually or collectively), how they celebrated holidays in semi-secret ways, how they adapted their religiosity to a new political context, and how they formed a new cultural environment in this way? How do I know what it really was like, "wie es eigentlich gewesen war"?

And, of course, it is clear to everyone that an adequate understanding of Soviet religious history is the key to understanding modern, post-Soviet transformations in this area: despite the widespread desire to forget the Soviet era as an annoying misunderstanding, "timelessness" or a temporary departure from the "pillar road of history", it is the Soviet experience - the experience of trauma and idealism.-

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fishing is still visible in all spheres of life in recent decades in the vast post-Soviet territory.

These were, in the end, the questions of the conference held in Moscow in February. For the first time, the Conference deliberately applied a new lens to the history of religions in the USSR: to study not state policy in this area, not church-state relations, not biographies of religious leaders - all this has been covered more than once in the historiography of recent decades-but to look at "practices and everyday life", what can be called lived religion - a living religion, a religion in the form in which it was actually lived. More attention was paid to ordinary clergy, and even more to lay people, and even to those who, not being fully "religious", reacted to religious meanings; more attention was paid not to dogmas, canons and norms, but to specific actions, ritual or otherwise.

In other words: in addition to being one of the largest religious studies conferences in recent times, it was also the first conference dedicated directly to"religious practices"1. It is unlikely that such a conference would have been possible earlier, five or ten years ago, but now it has "matured", taken place and opened up an inexhaustible range of sources and topics. As many have noted, this conference can be considered the first experience of sharing new materials and new approaches - an experience that is not yet sufficient for large conclusions and generalizations. This is partly true, but we will try to make some generalizations right now.

But first , some general and dry information. The conference "Religious Practices in the USSR..." was held on February 16-18, 2012 at the Russian State University for the Humanities (RSUH) and was jointly organized by the RSUH Center for Religious Studies and the Center for the History of Religion and the Church of the Institute of Universal History of the Russian Academy of Sciences.2 The conference gathered about 95 th-

1. The exception was a relatively small workshop at the University of Pennsylvania, held in March 2010; it was called: New Religious Histories: Rethinking Religion and Secularization in 20th Century Ukraine and Russia (a book is currently being prepared). This conference was also aimed at "practices", at everyday religiosity.

2. For the conference program and titles of papers mentioned in the text, see: http://russ.ru/Mirovaya-povestka/Religioznye-praktiki-v-SSSR-vyzhivanie-i-soprotivlenie-v-u sloviyah-nasil-stvennoj-sekulyarizacii (accessed 03.05.2012).

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students who entered the program (about 20 of them could not attend, but sent their theses, and many of them-reports). The geography of the conference participants was roughly as follows: about a quarter of the participants were from Russian capitals; about 40% - from other Russian cities, about 10% - from Ukraine and a little more - from other countries, including the USA, Germany, France, Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Belarus.

The conference was devoted to the entire Soviet history from beginning to end, and, indeed, the reports covered both pre-war and post-war subjects (with some predominance of the latter, perhaps simply because the second period was longer). The thematic spectrum was extremely diverse, and this will be discussed in more detail below. But, perhaps, we should immediately name two large blocks of topics and three regions that, unfortunately, did not receive any coverage. These two topics are religion during the war and religion in the GULAG, although both certainly deserve close attention. And the three regions that formed a "gap" in the geography of the conference are the Soviet Central Asia, Transcaucasia and Moldova. It is difficult to understand why these topics and these regions were omitted - whether due to a simple combination of circumstances, or because of the break in scientific ties, or because of the lesser interest of historians.

But despite the "gaps", everything that took place at the conference can be called a great success, and the feedback from the participants was unanimously positive. What are its main results - or, if you prefer, the key questions raised in its course?

Sources: where, what and how can we learn about religion in the USSR?

If it is true that the current stage of research consists in the collection and classification of material, in the primary accumulation of micro-histories and case studies, then the first and decisive topic now is the topic of sources and methods. It is important not only to collect all archival and other sources, but also to understand how to work with them. Almost every report inevitably began with an analysis of sources. It was even suggested to think about bringing together all the available sources and critically evaluate them (N. Kitsenko).

There are various archives, but some of them are accessible, and some are closed or semi-closed for various reasons (for example,

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archives of the FSB, although there were reports with reference to them - A. Kurlandsky, A. Berelovich; or personal archives of priests closed by law for a period of seventy years). There are central and local archives associated with state bodies "responsible for religion" (they were called differently at different times). There are some church and other religious archives (including parish ones). But the problem is not only to get to the archive files, but also how to identify from the documents what relates to "living religiosity", and how to interpret this information, taking into account the almost inevitable distortions? It is necessary to calculate the motives of security officers, commissioners, priests, lay people and verify them, if possible, with independent evidence.

Another important source is Soviet religious studies conducted in the 1920s and 1930s. mostly ethnographers (M. Shakhnovich's report and T. Chumakova's report on the preparation for the 1937 census), and in the 1960s - 1980s-sociologists or specialists in "scientific atheism". These sources are highly biased ideologically, selective (inattention to some forms of unofficial religiosity) and sometimes methodologically naive (when, for example, informants were asked questions that obviously could not be adequately answered), and therefore a subtle interpretation technique is required here.

Another type of source is oral narratives, which complement written narratives (and often contradict them), but which also have their own distortions; sometimes they turn out to be irreplaceable (as, for example, was shown by M. Safarov on the example of reconstructing the history of the Muslim community in Moscow); personal memoirs are also attached here, which in some cases have to be resorted to - with all the risk of their reliability-as a single source (for example, when analyzing the sacrament of communion by A. Beglov).

Sometimes official church sources say more than one might expect from them: for example, the official and controlled by the Soviet and church authorities "Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate" or "Clergyman's Handbook", from which, in particular, one can learn, by careful reading and comparison with pre-revolutionary analogues, how pastoral practice has changed over several decades or the interpretation of sins subject to confession (in the report of N. Kitsenko).

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To these main sources, we can add other less obvious ones, such as postcards, which can be used to trace the dynamics of religious symbols and meanings that are supposedly reflected in mass perception (V. Kustov's report), or Soviet art cinema (L. Gorbachev's and L. Mazur's report).

In any case, in order to identify "practices" and religious "everyday life", it is necessary, as the participants said, to use special optics and follow some methodological principles. For example, one should rely on such evidence that reflects specific actions (more than words and thoughts); talk about behavior, and not about psychological state and experience (because the latter are least subject to verification); be aware of the presence of a constant, larger or smaller "gap" between the official canonical text (rule, norm) and practices, while understanding the correlation between them. As it was shown in a number of reports, the vagueness and mobility of the norm itself created a certain wide field of its application in life (such was, for example, the unclear norm of the frequency of communion - A. Beglov's report). And another principle mentioned by the participants: religion should not be separated from the total social and cultural experience of Soviet people; uncritical concentration of attentiononly on religion - and it is religion that is the object of all the studies presented-can lead to a distorted exaggeration, an optical illusion-the idea of a continuous underground religiosity of the Soviet population throughout Soviet history; therefore, sobriety and common sense are required to find a place for religion that would be commensurate with the totality of other practices.

Some key topics: secularization, violence, new forms of religion, and the relationship between Soviet and traditional symbolic systems

And here we come, in fact, to the key topics that explicitly or implicitly determine the course of all studies of religious everyday life in the USSR. In fact, the very name of the conference caused controversy: to what extent Soviet secularization was "forced" and to what extent it was natural

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a process that unfolded in parallel all over the world, or at least in European countries? There were different opinions on this. On the one hand, the parallels with world processes are obvious; on the other hand, it is difficult to deny the radical, "experimental" and ideologically programmatic nature of Soviet anti-religious repressions. There may be discrepancies (partly caused by the inconsistency of "optics" and the source base) about how secular/religious imperial Russia was (the degree of its religiosity is often exaggerated, and therefore the degree of susceptibility to "atheism" is downplayed); as well as about what was the real "degree of faith" in different Soviet periods (for example, in the case of the Russian Orthodox Church). how can we assess the high level of religiosity reflected in the 1937 census" rejected "by Stalin, when 56.7% identified themselves as believers), or how significant were the "religious upswings" of the late 1940s (after the war and the temporary easing of policies), or the mid-1970s, and whether they correlated with similar fluctuations outside the USSR? Perhaps the Soviet secularization was not so much "violent" after all(forced), how much "forced", "accelerated" (such an intermediate solution was proposed by W. Hong in her report, referring to the use of the German word forciert in the literature).

This issue is also related to the controversy surrounding two more words from the conference title: "survival" and"resistance". Depending on whether we view Soviet secularization as "forced," "forced," or natural, we can (or not) present the religiosity of the Soviet population in terms of survival and resistance. These words seem to some to be inappropriate evaluative rhetoric until we define what exactly "resistance" is. How broad is this concept? Isn't every manifestation of religiosity under an officially anti - religious regime - for example, every rite of baptism-simply "by definition"resistance? Or, as some believe, "resistance" can only be considered explicit, conscious violations of Soviet written or unwritten prohibitions (for example, among the "catacombs" during the peak of repression), while everything else should rather be attributed to the category of "adaptation "("adaptation") or semi-hidden existence, or even in general parallel existence.

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These questions fit, among other things, into the general flow of relatively recent historiography devoted to various aspects of Soviet everyday life in general. There are extreme tendencies to regard all Soviet life as a constant, almost universal resistance to constant repression by the regime, or, conversely, to believe that the vast majority of Soviet people accepted the dominant official discourse (including atheism) and built their lives accordingly. But between these extreme models, there is an intermediate range of possible life tactics, and in fact most of them have worked out their own path of survival, evasion, or adaptation. The complexity of this picture, of course, cannot in any way mitigate the simple and clear characterization of the general background - the extreme rigidity and repressiveness that were inherent in the nature of the entire Soviet modernist project.

The picture that is revealed against this background in the religious sphere is really very complex. There was real resistance and illegal subcultures of protest: the same Orthodox "catacombs"; or spontaneous rural speeches in defense of priests, intertwined with anti-collective riots; or Pentecostals who combined acute eschatologism with emigrant orientations (report by S. Dudarenok). But there were also a huge number of examples of adaptation, evasion and "parallel existence". The main task is to systematize all these forms and, if possible, preserve objectivity that is not distorted by changing academic paradigms (for example, from focusing on the adaptability of politics to focusing on its repressiveness; accordingly, from underestimating "protest" to overestimating it, from downplaying the general level of religiosity to exaggerating it, etc.).

What were the most typical forms of religiosity that are strictly documented and can be reconstructed? The first general impression is that if we build a certain scale according to the degree of institutionalization of practices, then the bulk of manifestations of religiosity were located far from officially recognized (tolerated by the authorities) institutions and much closer to the informal, non-institutional pole. The impact on the institutions of traditional religions was so great, especially in the 1930s and then in the late 1950s, that religiosity was pushed out of them into a more or less free society.

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and a less controlled social space. If one formula, with the danger of oversimplification, conveys the general trend, it was as follows: from the old institutions to more diffuse forms; from publicity to privacy; from the collective to the individual; from the clergy to the laity; from men to women.

The conference provided a huge amount of material about the more or less organized, more or less dispersed living religion. In Orthodoxy, the church "facade" can be contrasted with the "catacomb" subculture (M. Shkarovsky) and many more dispersed forms, such as networks of relations around confessors and secret monks (N. Kitsenko); "wandering priests" (O. Morozov); elders and old women (O. Sibireva); secret home baptisms and marriages (N. Shlichta on Ukrainian material); pilgrimages to "so-called holy places" (as they were officially called in bureaucratic language) (S. Takahashi, W. Hong). In Islam, we can find very similar informal practices. Yarlykapov, R. Musina, I. Babich, M. Safarov). Similar phenomena can be recorded for other religions.

What did such "privatization" and de-institutionalization mean? They meant, first, the creation of a new intense, "hot" religiosity in those subcultures that emerged in response to repressive policies: in these new small groups, in families, in catacomb networks, a conscious sense of religious belonging, largely based on choice, was formed, reinforced by the risk of life. This "neophyte spirit" seems to have influenced the development of some key practices: for example, the importance of confession significantly increased (N. Kitsenko) and the attitude to communion as a free from compulsion, conscious and key Christian experience changed dramatically (A. Beglov).

Secondly (as A. Beglov noted in the discussion), they meant the creation of new forms and movements, the emergence of which was made possible precisely due to the weakening of the controlling, normative role of the old institutions: within the latter, for example, "mullah women" (Yu. Guseva) would be unrepresentable; home rituals; the creation of new wirds in Russia. Chechen exile (M. Roshchin); the same intense confessional networks in Orthodoxy; or, finally, the formation of a strong protest and Latin-oriented identity after the liquidation of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in 1946 (T. Bublyk, K. Budz). In general, we

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We can speak of a paradox: despite the fact that" forced secularization " radically undermined the traditional foundations of religions, it also stimulated religious creativity, released active spontaneous religiosity: for example, already in the 1920s, the anti-church policy of the Bolsheviks led to the opposite effect - a sharp increase in parish self-organization (G. Friz). And here again we come back to the question of "violence": were not some changes in religious life a natural internal need, even if such changes were provoked by state violence against the old institutions? If this is the case, then Soviet history fits more closely into the European stream of secularization.

Third, de-institutionalization meant the individualization of religiosity, the creation of many "non-canonical" religious identities - what is called bricolage. This was true for folklore religiosity, when, for example, it was necessary to do without a priest (mullah, rabbi), in the area of a certain canonical vacuum, and then those things that, from the point of view of official religious institutions (as well as official Soviet authorities), were considered as "pagan remnants"flourished. But bricolage refers even more to the religious search of the intelligentsia, which intensified in the 1970s and 1980s, when "returning" to tradition meant, in fact, constructing a new system of beliefs and practices from any suitable "spiritual" material (N. Mitrokhin, K. Rousselet, V. Klyueva).

And here, when we talk about individual searches and inventions in the religious sphere, we come across another huge topic that was constantly raised during the conference: These are the complex relations of religious meanings and practices with the ideological and practical cosmos of the Soviet regime. Official atheism gradually grew into a whole complex doctrinal subsystem of Soviet (Marxist-Leninist) ideology; it was supported by a large number of state-paid officials and was designed to form a new homo soveticus mentality and a new "socialist ritualism" (a term that was coined in the post-war period by party specialists who recognized the need for rituals as such). This whole complex of ideas and practices was intended to replace religious analogues and prepare the masses to accept socialism as a kind of civil religion. At the same time, it should be remembered that

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not only the official efforts of regular atheists, but also the Soviet habitus itself, the entire Soviet everyday life, were powerful tools for the daily, inescapable processing of "human material".

The correlation of religious and Soviet (by the way, not entirely secular) symbolic systems, their confrontation was not only a rational "displacement", but also led to the creation of adapted constructions; as a result, a large number of different mixed, intermediate forms of preserving religiosity and its transformation appeared. This was true for old traditional social spaces, such as Central Russian villages; but it was also true for new cities, where the authorities wanted to create a new, socialist culture from a "clean slate" (as, for example, the "city without churches" Magnitogorsk - in the report of N. Makarova). A number of reports perfectly illustrated the mixed nature of many cultural phenomena that combine religious and Soviet elements: first of all, elements of funeral rites (A. Sokolova, K. Wanner, V. Smolkin-Rothrock) and, as a rule, the inclusion of religious symbols in funeral practices allowed by the authorities (in Islam - according to the reports of A. Kobzev, M. Safarov). On the contrary, as far as marriage is concerned, the authorities sought greater purity and strict replacement of the religious rite with the rites developed in the 1950s and 1960s, when the "rehabilitated" wedding appeared in a completely new, "socialist" spirit (E. Zhidkova). Some traditions were designed to emphasize the continuity between "traditional folk customs" (so highly valued in the normative Soviet ideology). and socialist culture: such, for example, are the new" old " Ossetian rites of the 1960s. (S. Shtyrkov). Sometimes the traditional pilgrimage, timed to coincide with the patronal feast of the local church, could be inextricably intertwined with a secular rural holiday with the participation of the highest party authorities (U.S.S.R. Hong on the pilgrimage to Lake Svetloyar). Collective baptisms could be timed to coincide with official holidays (May 1 and November 7), and thus the "holiday" as such acquired a double meaning (N. Shlichta). In the end, official atheism did not achieve its goal of "complete displacement" (V. Smolkin-Rothrock), and therefore various mixes and combinations of two symbolic systems were often the content of Soviet religiosity.

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* * *

These are just some of the key topics raised at the RSUH conference. I cannot cover all the topics in sufficient detail in this brief essay, much less refer to all the reports, most of which deserve attention. This review does not cover, for example, the tender aspects of Soviet religiosity; the essential criteria for periodization of the entire period; the deep social roots of Soviet secularization, its connection with demographic and economic dynamics; differences in the "Soviet experience" of different religions and confessions; synchronous comparison of Soviet and Western trends in religion, and some other issues. In the future, we hope to address in more detail the entire spectrum of these topics - from a critical analysis of the source base to theoretical conclusions about the essence of the Soviet "atheistic experiment".

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